


Dune: Paul’s Women, Chapter 5 (Book II)

by Wodric



Series: Dune: Paul’s Women [19]
Category: Dune (1984), Dune - All Media Types, Dune Series - Frank Herbert, Frank Herbert's Dune (2000)
Genre: F/M, Incest, Masturbation, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-10
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2019-04-21 01:34:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14274069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wodric/pseuds/Wodric
Summary: Chapter's summary:Helena Richese talks to her son Leto in the planet Wallach IX.Paul and Jessica crash with a ’thopter. They walk in the desert and make camp for the day. The chapter end when they go to the tent to a bindu train session.See chapter 4 (Book II): https://archiveofourown.org/works/14264205See chapter 6 (Book II): https://archiveofourown.org/works/14284665





	Dune: Paul’s Women, Chapter 5 (Book II)

**Author's Note:**

> Leto’s mother is not a character from the original Dune work. There is a divergence. In The Dune Encyclopedia she is a concubine named Bekah, while in later works she is named Helena Richese. Since Bekah died in labor my option went to Lady Helena, a Bene Gesserit.

Paul’s Atreides Women

Book Two: MUAD’DIB

Chapter 5

 

At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.

\- from "A Child’s History of Muad’Dib" by the Princess Irulan

 

Lady Helena Richese made a pause before the door. She put her hand gently on the doorknob and recalled her Bene Gesserit training. She knew that the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam wasn’t in the bedroom, but still she hesitated.

How many years had passed? How many years she had abandoned Caladan? She missed it. But Caladan had too many memories. How many years did her husband, duke Paulus, died in the bullring? How many years had she not seen her son Leto?

She opened the door and entered the bedroom. The first thing that she noticed was the smell. It smelled at sex.

The bed was undone with the sheets at the bottom. The bedroom was empty and the door to the balcony was opened. She gave a few steps in that direction. Outside it was a sunny day. A soft breeze carried the fresh scent of the far woods.

“Leto?”

Her son was lying in a deck chair taking some sun and wearing only combat trunks.

“Leto?” she called again.

He had his eyes closed as he was sleeping.

“Leto?” she raised his voice. Her hand softly touched his naked shoulder.

Leto Atreides opened his eyes. His surprise was absolute before him was his mother. She was quite beautiful in a long white dress with a wide open cleavage and tiny straps, slender waist and openings in the skirt. Her light brown hair was loosened over her shoulders as he recalled, some sixteen years before. Her face still had an angel look with an open pleasant smile, a perfect nose and bright blue eyes.

“Mother? You didn’t age a single day. The spice was kind with you! What brings you here?”

She smiled showing her white teeth.

“You know that I live in this planet for years.”

“Gaius let you in? I tough I was a prisoner.”

“You should know that Gaius went to the imperial planet. She leaved today; it will take almost week until she may come back. I am older than her. I have many friends among the Bene Gesserit, no one could stop me from seeing my son.” Lady Helena gave a few steps positioning herself between the sun and her son “I guess that you didn’t get her pregnant yet!”

“She tried!” Leto smiled closing his eyes.

“Yes, I can smell it in the bedroom.” She look intensely to her son. “Why don’t you raise up from that chair and salute properly your mother? Are you drugged?”

Leto opened his eyes. In the last days he had difficulty to stay focused in anything but in his sexual activities with Gaius.

“Yes, probably the food is drugged.”

“She doesn’t need to drug you. I will speak in the kitchen. You are in a planet full of warrior women, far from any spaceport. This isn’t a prison cell, but you can’t run away.”

He rose up with difficulty and had to support his height on his mother.

“Hey, I got you… and you are still weak from the drug that the doctor injected you.”

“Thank you mother.” Leto embraced her with both arms. Holding her tight. His legs failing him but still standing. He was a slightly taller, her face nested in his neck curve and she also embraced her son. A humid drop felt in her face and she looked up, to her son bearded face and misaligned hair. He was crying and the sobs took hold of his chest.

She just hold him tightly and let him mourn. He was covered with sweat and still had the smell of Gaius in him. Lady Helena knew that smell to well. But Helena Richese ignored and hold him for all those years that she hadn’t seen her son and for the grandson that she had only seen once and that now was probably dead.

“Son… we must talk…” she pushed him and helped him to sit down again in the chair. She seated next to him and hold his face between her two hands. She dropped a kiss in his sweaty forehead, “You know why Gaius is retaining you here? She wants a daughter from you. She needs a daughter from you because Jessica disobeyed the sisterhood.”

“I know.” Leto faced danger in those words and tried to maintain focused.

“She departed to Kaitain this morning because she needs to be with the emperor every three weeks. If she has a child she can claim that is from the emperor. But she doesn’t have much time. It is said that the emperor is becoming impotent and the spice doesn’t help him much. But if she went to Kaitain that means that she isn’t pregnant yet. After all these days with you here. Why? Did she become sterile, or it is you, my son, that became sterile? We need to know!”

“Who are ‘we’?”

“You and me! We must save the Atreides House.”

“I thought that you were talking in the name of the Bene Gessserit.”

She slapped his face with violence.

“You are talking with your mother. I forgive you because I know that you are under the influence of drugs.”

She placed her right fingers between her breasts, in her cleavage, and removed a small glass jar from the interior of her dress.

“We need to analyze your semen. We need to know if you are infertile, or if it is Gaius. If you are infertile your life is at risk here. Gaius loves you, but will sacrifice you like a lamb.”

Leto looked gazed to his mother.

“Take it” her two hands placed the small jar between Leto’s hands, “Go inside and fill this jar…”

She reached out to help Leto get up again. And lead him to the room, to seat him in the bed. Then she got out to the balcony and waited in the deck chair.

The sun went high and she dozed a bit warmed by the sunbeams and smoothly caressed by the gentle breeze that carried the scents of the gardens.

She rose up from the chair uncertain about how much time had passed. She decided to get in the bedroom checking if Leto had already finished the job.

Uncomfortable, she approached the door:

“Leto?! Can I come in?”

After a moment she decided to get in. Leto was still seated in the bed in a similar position where she had let him. He was totally naked. The combat trunks lay in the floor. He had an alienated expression in his face. His eyes were focused in nowhere, he hold the empty flask in his left hand and with the other he was playing with his soft penis.

“Leto!” She went forward and wrapped him again in her arms. He just dove and hide his face in her belly while embraced her waist. “Oh, Leto!”

She took a deep breath like a diver and took her decision. She began to unbutton the front of her white dress, one button after another, increasing even more her cleavage. She had no bra to hold her breasts. The spice and her intense Bene Gesserit train helped her to maintain the shape of her fit body.

Grabbing him by his hair on the back of the head, she raised his face while with the other and she uncovered a warm breast. Slowly she guided him against her until he begun to suckle like a newborn. Meanwhile her right hand went down. Traced his skin from his naked chest downwards until she found his soft penis partially resting on his upper leg. She wrapped her hand around it and gently begun to caress him. Stroking it. It took time but he begun to react and his penis begun to enlarge and to gain life. She didn’t rush it. She was a Bene Gesserit.

“Mother?”

“Shh…”

“Did you love my father?” he asked while suckling.

“No, Leto, I didn’t.” she kissed the top of his head. “We just had a political arrangement.”

Leto moaned and engulfed her breast again. He only had to push the fabric away with his mouth to open even more her dress cleavage and feel the beginning of the other breast. Then he retreated and his mouth attacked again onto her right breast, engulfing the nipple and most of the tit, lavishing saliva. She took his head and pressed it harder against her chest, lulling him.

His hands were not longer inactive around her waist. They entered in her dress from bellow and begun to caress her slim legs, raising steady, until they reached her butt to grab with anger her buttocks, taking her ass cheeks with the palms of his hands and squeezing them, spreading them and joining them again.

Before her there was no longer a son, there was a man in heat. And she wanted that, she wanted his seed. Where was the flask? She needed the jar.

She bent over him, her long hair falling on him, her mouth near his forehead, kissing, embracing him with her free hand, caressing, fondling and messing up his hair. She gently rubbed her fingers across the nape of his neck and around his shoulder blade, so he could raise his head, kiss her neck where the veins were palpitating, and her throat, with his hands around her buttocks. He seemed so content. His pleasure gave her such a motherly joy and made her so surprised that for some moments she truly found happiness.

“Shh…”

His penis was hard, hard and erect like a drill. It pulsed so much under her hand. And she stroke it with one hand while with the other she stroked his hair.

Her eyes went for the jar. Where was it? She found it on the floor, next to his feet. He probably let it fall.

She touched his neck and passed her fingers through his black hair. He bit at her nipple harder, his breath coming in great gasps now. She felt his penis growing larger and hotter as she intensified her massage, up and down his member, slowing her strokes when he begun to show signs of imminent climax.

Helena fought against him to be free of his arms. Quickly she leaned down and grabbed the flask with her free hand while the other continued to pump. She covered his member’s head with the jar and in wave of desire he came, like the spurt of a fountain, filling quickly the small flask. She leaned even closer, he gasped as his body convulsed expelling all his available liquid.

When finally his spasms ended they stood still, embraced again, happy in each others arms, like mother and son.

After a while she tried to move, but he embraced harder her waist.

“I have to go, Leto. You must to get dressed… I will come back tomorrow…”

He let his arms fall and then felt in his bed.

She quickly covered the jar, covered her disclosed breast, buttoned the dress and composed it before opening the door to leave the room.

“Wait… I need your help, mother! I need to know what happened to my family and my men”

“We must assume the worse, Leto! You must be ready to assume the worse!”

“I have a daughter. You have a granddaughter. We must find her.”

“A daughter?”

 

***

 

As Paul fought the ’thopter’s controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Mentat awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex.

The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.

I must find the right vortex, he thought.

For a long time now he had sensed the storm’s power diminishing, but still it shook them. He waited out another turbulence.

The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Paul defied all fear to bank the ’thopter left.

Jessica saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.

"Paul!" she screamed.

The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the ’thopter like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out–a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.

Paul looked down, saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert–moon- gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.

"We’re out of it," Jessica whispered.

Paul turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.

"We’ve given them the slip," he said.

Jessica felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.

It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It’s gone, but we remain.

"I don’t like the sound of our wing motion," Paul said. "We suffered some damage in there."

He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and Paul sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.

He shivered.

The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the spice-saturated diet of Arrakis. But he thought part of it could be the litany, as though the words had a power of their own.

"I shall not fear..."

Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of selfawareness that could not have been without the litany’s magic.

Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: "What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?"

"There’s rock all around," Jessica said.

Paul focused on the ’thopter ’s launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm’s doing.

"Better set us down on sand," Jessica said. "The wings might not take full brake."

He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes.

"I’ll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness."

She obeyed, thinking: We’ve water and stillsuits. If we can find food, we can survive a long time on this desert. Fremen live here. What they can do we can do.

"Run for those rocks the instant we’re stopped," Paul said. "I’ll take the pack."

"Run for... " She fell silent, nodded. "Worms."

"Our friends, the worms," he corrected her. "They’ll get this ’thopter. There’ll be no evidence of where we landed."

How direct his thinking, she thought.

They glided lower... lower...

There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage–blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The ’thopter touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, touched another dune.

He’s killing our speed against the sand, Jessica thought, and permitted herself to admire his competence.

"Brace yourself!" Paul warned.

He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them cup the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings’ leaves.

Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the side of the ’thopter. The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.

Paul jerked off his safety harness, hurled himself upward across his mother, wrenching the door open. Sand poured around them into the cabin, bringing a dry smell of burned flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear, saw that his mother was free of her harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the ’thopter ’s metal skin. Paul followed, dragging the pack by its straps.

"Run!" he ordered.

He pointed up the dune face and beyond it where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.

Jessica leaped off the ’thopter and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Paul’s panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away toward the rocks.

"Follow the ridge," Paul ordered. "It’ll be faster."

They slogged toward the rocks, sand gripping their feet.

A new sound began to impress itself on them: a muted whisper, a hissing, an abrasive slithering.

"Worm," Paul said.

It grew louder.

"Faster!" Paul gasped.

The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.

Paul shifted his pack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took his mother’s arm with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-littered surface through a twisted, wind - carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.

"I can’t run any farther," Jessica panted.

Paul stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island–moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Paul’s eyes at a distance of about a kilometer. The flattened dunes of its track curved once–a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they had abandoned their wrecked ornithopter.

Where the worm had been there was no sign of the aircraft.

The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across its own path, questing.

"It’s bigger than a Guild spaceship," Paul whispered. "I was told worms grew large in the deep desert, but I didn’t realize... how big."

"Nor I," Jessica breathed.

Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curving track toward the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings around them.

Paul took a deep breath, looked up at the moon-frosted escarpment, and quoted from the Kitab al-Ibar:

"Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day." He looked at his mother, and embraced her. "We still have a few hours of night. Can you go on?" he gave her a quick kiss in her lips. Her mouth was warm and inviting. There was a taste of spice in her saliva.

"In a moment."

Paul stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps. He stood a moment with a paracompass in his hands.

"Whenever you’re ready," he said.

She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. "Which direction?"

"Where this ridge leads." He pointed.

"Deep into the desert," she said.

"The Fremen desert," Paul whispered.

And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.

Idaho was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Idaho is dead.

"Do you see a way to go?" Jessica asked, mistaking his hesitation.

"No," he said, "But we’ll go anyway."

He settled his shoulders more firmly in the pack, struck out up a sand- carved channel in the rock. The channel opened onto a moonlit floor of rock with benched ledges climbing away to the south.

Paul headed for the first ledge, clambered onto it. Jessica followed.

She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and particular – the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the wind-carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstruction that forced a choice: Go over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms. They spoke only when necessary and then with the hoarse voices of their exertion.

"Careful here – this ledge is slippery with sand."

"Watch you don’t hit your head against this overhang."

"Stay below this ridge; the moon’s at our backs and it’d show our movement to anyone out there."

Paul stopped in a bight of rock, leaned the pack against a narrow ledge.

Jessica leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan – a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn’t been noticed for itself... only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.

To stop, she thought. To rest... truly rest.

It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.

Paul pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping surface. Jessica followed with a sigh.

They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face. Again, they fell into the disjointed rhythm of movement across this broken land.

Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands – boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.

The powder clogged nose filters and had to be blown out. Pea sand and pea gravel rolled on a hard surface and could spill the unwary. Rock flakes cut.

And the omnipresent sand patches dragged against their feet.

Paul stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadied his mother as she stumbled into him.

He was pointing left and she looked along his arm to see that they stood atop a cliff with the desert stretched out like a static ocean some two hundred meters below. It lay there full of moon-silvered waves – shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.

"Open desert," she said.

"A wide place to cross," Paul said, and his voice was muffled by the filter trap across his face.

Jessica glanced left and right – nothing but sand below.

Paul stared straight ahead across the open dunes, watching the movement of shadows in the moon’s passage.

"About three or four kilometers across," he said.

"Worms," she said.

"Sure to be."

She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses.

"Shall we rest and eat?"

Paul slipped out of the pack, sat down and leaned against it. Jessica supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him. She felt Paul turn as she settled herself, heard him scrabbling in the pack.

"Here," he said.

His hand felt dry against hers as he pressed two energy capsules into her palm She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her stillsuit tube.

"Drink all your water," Paul said. "Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit."

She obeyed, drained her catchpockets, feeling energy return. She thought then how peaceful it was here in this moment of their tiredness, and she recalled once hearing the minstrel-warrior Gurney Halleck say, "Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife."

Jessica repeated the words to Paul.

"That was Gurney," he said.

She caught the tone of his voice, the way he spoke as of someone dead, thought: And well poor Gurney might be dead. The Atreides forces were either dead or captive or lost like themselves in this waterless void.

"Gurney always had the right quotation," Paul said. "I can hear him now: ’And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked; and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.’ "

Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in her son’s voice.

Presently, Paul said: "How do you... feel?"

She smiled to him, “I am well…”

And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it was the Bene Gesserit way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I’m afraid of my son; I fear his strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.

Paul pulled his hood down over his eyes, listened to the bug-hustling sounds of the night. His lungs were charged with his own silence. His nose itched. He rubbed it, removed the filter and grew conscious of the rich smell of cinnamon.

"There’s melange spice nearby," he said.

An eider wind feathered Paul’s cheeks, ruffled the folds of his burnoose. But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.

"Dawn soon," he said.

Jessica nodded.

"There’s a way to get safely across that open sand," Paul said. "The Fremen do it."

"The worms?"

"If we were to plant a thumper from our Fremkit back in the rocks here," Paul said. "It’d keep a worm occupied for a time."

She glanced at the stretch of moonlighted desert between them and the other escarpment.

"Four kilometers worth of time?"

"Perhaps. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that don’t attract the worms… "

Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive terror at thought of the worms. He knew as though it lay just at the edge of his awareness that the worms were to be respected and not feared... if... if...

He shook his head.

"It’d have to be sounds without rhythm," Jessica said.

"What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps... the sand itself must shift down at times. Worms can’t investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested before we try it, though."

He looked across at that other rock wall, seeing the passage of time in the vertical moonshadows there.

"It’ll be dawn within the hour."

"Where’ll we spend the day?" she asked.

Paul turned left, pointed.

"The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it’s wind-cut  
that’s the windward face. There’ll be crevasses there, deep ones."

"Had we better get started?" she asked.

He stood, helped her to her feet. "Are you rested enough for a climb down? I want to get as close as possible to the desert floor before we camp."

"Enough." She nodded for him to lead the way.

He hesitated, then lifted the pack, settled it onto his shoulders and turned along the cliff.

If only we had suspensors, Jessica thought. It’d be such a simple matter to jump down there. But perhaps suspensors are another thing to avoid in the open desert. Maybe they attract the worms the way a shield does.

They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.

Paul led the way down, moving cautiously but hurrying because it was obvious the moonlight could not last much longer. They wound down into a world of deeper and deeper shadows .Hints of rock shape climbed to the stars around them. The fissure narrowed to some ten meters’ width at the brink of a dim gray sandslope that slanted downward into darkness.

"Can we do down?" Jessica whispered.

"I think so."

He tested the surface with one foot.

"We can slide down," he said. "I’ll go first. Wait until you hear me stop."

"Careful," she said.

He stepped onto the slope and slid and slipped down its soft surface onto an almost level floor of packed sand. The place was deep within the rock walls.

There came the sound of sand sliding behind him. He tried to see up the slope in the darkness, was almost knocked over by the cascade. It trailed away to silence.

"Mother?" he said.

There was no answer.

"Mother?"

He dropped the pack, hurled himself up the slope, scrambling, digging, throwing sand like a wild man. "Mother!" he gasped. "Mother, where are you?"

Another cascade of sand swept down on him, burying him to the hips. He wrenched himself out of it.

She’s been caught in the sandslide, he thought. Buried in it. I must be calm and work this out carefully. She won’t smother immediately. She’ll compose herself in bindu suspension to reduce her oxygen needs. She knows I’ll dig for her.

In the Bene Gesserit way she had taught him, Paul stilled the savage beating of his heart, set his mind as a blank slate upon which the past few moments could write themselves. Every partial shift and twist of the slide replayed itself in his memory, moving with an interior stateliness that contrasted with the fractional second of real time required for the total recall.

Presently, Paul moved slantwise up the slope, probing cautiously until he found the wall of the fissure, an outcurve of rock there. He began to dig, moving the sand with care not to dislodge another slide. A piece of fabric came under his hands. He followed it, found an arm. Gently, he traced the arm, exposed her face.

"Do you hear me?" he whispered.

No answer.

He dug faster, freed her shoulders. She was limp beneath his hands, but he detected a slow heartbeat.

Bindu suspension, he told himself.

He cleared the sand away to her waist, draped her arms over his shoulders and pulled downslope, slowly at first, then dragging her as fast as he could, feeling the sand give way above. Faster and faster he pulled her, gasping with the effort, fighting to keep his balance. He was out on the hard-packed floor of the fissure then, swinging her to his shoulder and breaking into a staggering run as the entire sandslope came down with a loud hiss that echoed and was magnified within the rock walls.

He stopped at the end of the fissure where it looked out on the desert’s marching dunes some thirty meters below. Gently, he lowered her to the sand, uttered the word to bring her out of the catalepsis.

She awakened slowly, taking deeper and deeper breaths.

"I knew you’d find me," she whispered.

He looked back up the fissure. "It might have been kinder if I hadn’t."

"Paul!"

"I lost the pack," he said. "It’s buried under a hundred tons of sand... at least."

"Everything?"

"The spare water, the stilltent–everything that counts." He touched a pocket. "I still have the paracompass." He fumbled at the waist sash. "Knife and binoculars. We can get a good look around the place where we’ll die."

In that instant, the sun lifted above the horizon somewhere to the left beyond the end of the fissure. Colors blinked in the sand out on the open desert. A chorus of birds held forth their songs from hidden places among the rocks.

But Jessica had eyes only for the despair in Paul’s face. She edged her voice with scorn, said: "Is this the way you were taught?"

"Don’t you understand?" he asked. "Everything we need to survive in this place is under that sand."

"You found me," she said, and now her voice was soft, reasonable.

Paul squatted back on his heels.

Presently, he looked up the fissure at the new slope, studying it, marking the looseness of the sand.

"If we could immobilize a small area of that slope and the upper face of a hole dug into the sand, we might be able to put down a shaft to the pack. Water might do it, but we don’t have enough water for . .." He broke off, then: "Foam."

Jessica held herself to stillness lest she disturb the hyper-functioning of his mind.

Paul looked out at the open dunes, searching with his nostrils as well as his eyes, finding the direction and then centering his attention on a darkened patch of sand below them.

"Spice," he said. "Its essence–highly alkaline. And I have the paracompass. Its power pack is acidbase."

Jessica sat up straight against the rock.

Paul ignored her, leaped to his feet, and was off down the wind-compacted surface that spilled from the end of the fissure to the desert’s floor.

She watched the way he walked, breaking his stride–step... pause, step- step... slide. . . pause...

There was no rhythm to it that might tell a marauding worm something not of the desert moved here.

Paul reached the spice patch, shoveled a mound of it into a fold of his robe, returned to the fissure. He spilled the spice onto the sand in front of Jessica, squatted and began dismantling the paracompass, using the point of his knife. The compass face came off. He removed his sash, spread the compass parts on it, lifted out the power pack. The dial mechanism came out next, leaving an empty dished compartment in the instrument.

"You’ll need water," Jessica said.

Paul took the catchtube from his neck, sucked up a mouthful, expelled it into the dished compartment.

If this fails, that’s water wasted, Jessica thought. But it won’t matter then, anyway.

With his knife, Paul cut open the power pack, spilled its crystals into the water. They foamed slightly, subsided.

Jessica’s eyes caught motion above them. She looked up to see a line of hawks along the rim of the fissure. They perched there staring down at the open water.

Great Mother! she thought. They can sense water even at that distance!

Paul had the cover back on the paracompass, leaving off the reset button which gave a small hole into the liquid. Taking the reworked instrument in one hand, a handful of spice in the other, Paul went back up the fissure, studying the lay of the slope. His robe billowed gently without the sash to hold it. He waded part way up the slope, kicking off sand rivulets, spurts of dust.

Presently, he stopped, pressed a pinch of the spice into the paracompass, shook the instrument case.

Green foam boiled out of the hole where the reset button had been. Paul aimed it at the slope, spread a low dike there, began kicking away the sand beneath it, immobilizing the opened face with more foam.

Jessica moved to a position below him, called out: "May I help?"

"Come up and dig," he said. "We’ve about three meters to go. It’s going to be a near thing." As he spoke, the foam stopped billowing from the instrument.

"Quickly," Paul said. "No telling how long this foam will hold the sand."

Jessica scrambled up beside Paul as he sifted another pinch of spice into the hole, shook the paracompass case. Again, foam boiled from it.

As Paul directed the foam barrier, Jessica dug with her hands, hurling the sand down the slope.

"How deep?" she panted.

"About three meters," he said. "And I can only approximate the position. We may have to widen this hole." He moved a step aside, slipping in loose sand. "Slant your digging backward. Don’t go straight down."

Jessica obeyed.

Slowly, the hole went down, reaching a level even with the floor of the basin and still no sign of the pack.

Could I have miscalculated? Paul asked himself. I’m the one that panicked originally and caused this mistake. Has that warped my ability?

He looked at the paracompass. Less than two ounces of the acid infusion remained.

Jessica straightened in the hole, rubbed a foam-stained hand across her cheek. Her eyes met Paul’s.

"The upper face," Paul said. "Gently, now." He added another pinch of spice to the container, sent the foam boiling around Jessica’s hands as she began cutting a vertical face in the upper slant of the hole. On the second pass, her hands encountered something hard. Slowly, she worked out a length of strap with a plastic buckle.

"Don’t move any more of it," Paul said and his voice was almost a whisper.

"We’re out of foam."

Jessica held the strap in one hand, looked up at him.

Paul threw the empty paracompass down onto the floor of the basin, said: "Give me your other hand. Now listen carefully. I’m going to pull you to the side and downhill. Don’t let go of that strap. We won’t get much more spill from the top. This slope has stabilized itself. All I’m going to aim for is to keep your head free of the sand. Once that hole’s filled, we can dig you out and pull up the pack."

"I understand," she said.

"Ready?"

"Ready." She tensed her fingers on the strap.

With one surge, Paul had her half out of the hole, holding her head up as the foam barrier gave way and sand spilled down. When it had subsided, Jessica remained buried to the waist, her left arm and shoulder still under the sand, her chin protected on a fold of Paul’s robe. Her shoulder ached from the strain put on it.

"I still have the strap," she said.

Slowly, Paul worked his hand into the sand beside her, found the strap. "Together," he said.

"Steady pressure. We mustn’t break it."

More sand spilled down as they worked the pack up. When the strap cleared the surface, Paul stopped, freed his mother from the sand. Together then they pulled the pack downslope and out of its trap.

In a few minutes they stood on the floor of the fissure holding the pack between them.

Paul looked at his mother. Foam stained her face, her robe. Sand was caked to her where the foam had dried. She looked as though she had been a target for balls of wet, green sand.

"You look a mess," he said, trying to clean her face with his hand.

"You’re not so pretty yourself," she said.

They started to laugh, then sobered.

"That shouldn’t have happened," Paul said. "I was careless."

She shrugged, feeling caked sand fall away from her robe.

"I’ll put up the tent," he said. "Better slip off that robe and shake it out." He turned away, taking the pack.

Jessica nodded, suddenly too tired to answer, and begun to undress the robe and the stillsuit.

"There’s anchor holes in the rock," Paul said. "Someone’s tented here before."

Why not? she thought as she brushed at her robe. This was a likely place – deep in rock walls and facing another cliff some four kilometers away – far enough above the desert to avoid worms but close enough for easy access before a crossing.

She turned, almost naked, only wearing her light tunic around the waist, her breast bouncing with each movement, seeing that Paul had the tent up, its rib-domed hemisphere blending with the rock walls of the fissure. Her son had also undressed, leaving only his fighting trunks he’d worn under his stillsuit.

Paul stepped past her, lifting his binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a quick twist, focused the oil lenses on the other cliff lifting golden tan in morning light across open sand.

Jessica watched as he studied that apocalyptic landscape, his eyes probing into sand rivers and canyons.

"There are growing things over there," he said.

Jessica found the spare binoculars in the pack beside the tent, moved up beside Paul.

"There," he said, holding the binoculars with one hand and pointing with the other.

She looked where he pointed.

"Saguaro," she said. "Scrawny stuff."

"There may be people nearby," Paul said.

"That could be the remains of a botanical testing station," she warned.

"This is pretty far south into the desert," he said. He lowered his binoculars, rubbed beneath his filter baffle, feeling how dry and chapped his lips were, sensing the dusty taste of thirst in his mouth. "This has the feeling of a Fremen place," he said.

"Are we certain the Fremen will be friendly?" she asked.

"Kynes promised their help."

But there’s desperation in the people of this desert, she thought. I felt some of it myself today. Desperate people might kill us for our water.

She closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan–she and the Duke Leto, before Paul’s birth. They’d flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the deltas. And they had seen the ant lines in the greenery–man-gangs carrying their loads on suspensor – buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there’d been the white petals of trimaran dhows.

All of it gone.

Jessica opened her eyes to the desert stillness, to the mounting warmth of the day. 

Restless heat devils were beginning to set the air aquiver out on the open sand. The other rock face across from them was like a thing seen through cheap glass.

A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the open end of the fissure. The sand hissed down, loosed by puffs of morning breeze, by the hawks that were beginning to lift away from the clifftop. When the sandfall was gone, she still heard it hissing. It grew louder, a sound that once heard, was never forgotten.

"Worm," Paul whispered.

It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water. Then it was gone, coursing off to the left.

The sound diminished, died.

"I’ve seen space frigates that were smaller," Paul whispered.

She nodded, continuing to stare across the desert. Where the worm had passed there remained that tantalizing gap. It flowed bitterly endless before them, beckoning beneath its horizontal collapse of skyline.

"When we’ve rested," Jessica said, "we should continue with your lessons."

He suppressed a sudden anger, said: "Mother, don’t you think we could do without..."

"Today you panicked," she said. "You know your mind and bindu-nervature perhaps better than I do, but you’ve much yet to learn about your body’s prana-musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Paul, and I can teach you about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body. You need review of the hands. We’ll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and tip sensitivity." She turned away. "Come, into the tent, now."

He flexed the fingers of his left hand, watching her naked body crawl through the sphincter valve, knowing that he could not deflect her from this determination... that he must agree. But he smiled, he knew that it would be more than a simple bindu train.

Whatever has been done to me, I’ve been a party to it, he thought.

Review of the hand!

He looked at his hand. How inadequate it appeared when measured against such creatures as that worm.


End file.
